How will you let your boss or client know all the great stuff you’re up to?

Is there an easy way to see for yourself how things are going?

Creating a social media report can be key to explaining your progress on social media. You can choose the stats that matter and deliver it in an easy-to-understand way; there’re tons of personal insights to gain as well as valuable info for your boss or client.

We’re grateful for the example of so many Buffer users who are already creating social media reports of their own to share with a boss or client. I’d love to share a bit about how these reports come together—and how you can make one for yourself.

Before we get into the details of the social media report, I thought it might be useful to go over the many different factors—metrics (and reasons for the metrics), timeframes, growth—that might go into a report.

In asking around with our awesome Buffer users, we found that social media reports can differ person-to-person and brand-to-brand in a number of ways.

First: Which stats matter to you?

A social media report is simply a collection of data and stats.

Which data and stats should be on there? And why?

The answer likely depends on your specific social media strategies and goals.

Followers tell you the number of people who wish to connect with your brand. The benefits of followers are for the reach of your content, the social proof of your brand’s popularity, and in some cases a simple vanity metric to boost your confidence!

Clicks tell you that the content you’re sharing is of personal interest to the user. Clicks send traffic to a URL and establish your social profile as a great resource for curated content.

Retweets tell you that the content you’re sharing is perceived as potentially interesting to one’s followers. The benefits of retweets is for advanced exposure to people who aren’t your followers and social proof that you know what you’re doing on social media.

Favorites are somewhat of a wild card. The benefit of favorites is as a social proof metric, and beyond that, it’s a bit hard to tell what people are thinking when they favorite because there are so many different strategies and reasons (curation, appreciation, bookmarking, etc.). On some channels, favorites/likes may surface the content higher into the News Feed.

Which timeframe is most valuable to you?

Here’re the timelines that have come up most often in our discussions:

Weekly

Monthly

Quarterly

From campaign start to end

(Note: For monthly reports, some use a 28-day period so that it’s consistent across all months, since the months may vary in length. Also, for quarterly reports, often a 90-day period is used, as you can fit four 90-day periods into a year.)

How do you want to track your progress and growth?

Also, there can be some differences in the way you view progress. For instance, are you most interested in seeing where you are today, or how you’ve grown from a previous point in time?

Here’re some of the different ways we’ve found to look at reports in this case:

Snapshot – A look at the numbers for a chosen period, with no previous history considered

Week over week, period over period – A comparison of stats for a chosen period with stats for the previous period, or even from the previous year

1. Follower growth

“We’re gaining 1,000 new followers every week!”

When your boss or client looks at followers, they could draw lots of conclusions: popularity, reach, brand awareness, etc. And each one is valid. People follow social media profiles for a variety of reasons, some to receive the content from that profile, some to show their affiliation for the brand.

As you grow the followers on your social media profile, your influence gets a little wider, both in the number of people you will potentially reach and in the perceptions others have of you. A growth report is a great way to capture these two ideas.

How to create the report:

The free version of TwitterCounter shows you stats on your followers, how the number changes on a daily basis, your daily average of new followers, and your projections for the coming week.

(I’ve found that follower growth is often best kept as a whole number, i.e. “I gained 35 new followers this week” as opposed to “My followers grew 0.3% this week.” The whole numbers seem a bit easier to compare.)

As you continue pulling these reports, you can also compare growth from week to week by looking at the New Followers Gained stat based on different time periods.

2. Influencer report

“Wow! Check this out! Taye Diggs is following us!”

Sometimes, it’s just really cool to know that someone big or influential is following you. In the long run, it’s likely a vanity metric, yet it’s still a fun occasion to celebrate—and perhaps to share with your boss or client.

The practical value of having influencers among your followers is that any social media update of yours has the chance to take off big time. And influencers among your tribe is great social proof for others to see that you’re being taken seriously by big-time users.

How to create the report:

To identify Twitter influencers, Followerwonk and SocialRank are a couple of the handful of tools that can help identify influential followers.

Sign up at either of these websites, connect your accounts (Followerwonk focuses on Twitter, and SocialRank does Twitter and—coming soon—Instagram), locate the followers with the largest followings, and add it all to your report.

3. Volume of posts

“Here’s what we’ve been up to for the past month. 110 posts!”

I was really interested to learn that one of the key reports that people run is a simple counting of the number of times they’ve shared to a social network. The report shows quantity of posts. You can compare it to previous periods to see how the volume has changed over time. (You can go super advanced and see how volume affects other stats like engagement and follower growth, too.)

How to create the report:

Export the data from Buffer, Twitter, or Facebook.

The export file will contain rows of your social media updates with columns for the individual stats on each update.

Count the number of rows (which equals the number of posts) by running this formula:

=COUNT(A:A)

“A” represents the column with the update text.

4. Reach Rate

“Lookit! Our posts are seen by 10 percent of our fans.”

One of the Buffer users who shared some reporting insights with us had a great description for their process. Their team looks for reach and resonance.

Reach is the amount of people who might see a post.

Resonance is the interactions with the content.

Reach can sometimes be a bit of a tricky term. Facebook uses it to refer to the number of people who see a post. Twitter calls the same thing Impressions. Either way, this metric can often be the best way to understand exactly how many people are seeing the content you share (the actual reach), regardless of how many followers you have (the potential reach).

How to create the report:

Twitter Analytics is currently the best place (and maybe only place) to find Impressions data for tweets. When you export your data from Twitter, one of the columns will be impressions for each tweet.

Buffer tracks reach for Facebook and potential reach for Twitter (potential reach is the sum of your followers plus the followers of those who retweeted you).

Get the reach/impressions per post by totaling up reach and dividing by the number of posts.

Reach per post (divided by) total followers = % of followers who see your content

5. Total engagement

“Does our stuff resonate with people? You betcha! 425 total interactions this month.”

Total engagement can mean different things to different people. In general, engagement is the sum of clicks, reshares, likes, and comments—basically every interaction one can take on a social media update.

What this information tells you is the overall effectiveness of your tweet. Did people like what you shared? If so, engagement will be high, regardless of whether the interaction was mostly due to one metric over the others. Engagement is the catchall for social media success. Good engagement = good sharing.

How to create the report:

Export the data from Buffer, Twitter, or Facebook.

In some cases, engagement may already be added together for you. If not, add up the total interactions in the columns for clicks, reshares, likes, and comments.

Done!

6. Engagement per post

“Every time we post, we can expect to get 25 interactions!”

The next step from the total engagement figure above is engagement per post. Instead of looking at total engagement for a certain period (which can fluctuate based on how many times you post), you can drill down into engagement per post, which shows a somewhat clearer picture of exactly how engaged people are with your content.

How to create the report:

Divide total engagement by number of posts.

7. Engagement per follower

“Nearly 3% of our followers engage with us each time we share an update! Wahoo!”

The cool thing about tracking engagement per follower is that you get a sense of how you might be able to scale your social media sharing. If you’re working to gain more followers, and you know you’re capable of getting a certain engagement/follower, then you’re likely to see your engagement go up. If you’re able to move the needle on engagement per follower, you’ll likely see an even bigger jump in engagement once your followers increase.

Another super helpful area for you, the social media manager, is using this stat to compare performance across multiple social channels, for instance Twitter vs. Instagram. Engagement per follower helps to normalize your metrics and easily compare.

How to create the report:

Add up the total engagement for your posts (see above). Divide by the number of times you’ve posted.

Take this engagement per post figure and divide by the number of followers you have.

8. Clicks

“Our social media posts have sent 350 visits back to our website this week!”

We’ve been using clicks as a key part of our goals and strategy for several months (if not years) here at Buffer. Clicks are the most direct metric that you can tie back to your website. When someone clicks, a couple of great things happened: 1) you wrote a great headline or created an awesome visual, and 2) that person is now checking out your site, signing up for email lists, reading more articles, advancing into the marketing funnel.

How to create the report:

Export the data from Buffer, Twitter, or Facebook.

If you’re interested in total clicks, add up the clicks from each post in your date range.

If you’re interested in clicks per post (a favorite metric of ours), divide the total clicks by number of posts.

If you’re interested in clicks per followers, take the clicks per post number and divide by total followers.

9. Social referral traffic

“Look at how many visitors to our site have come through social media!”

Clicks are a great way to measure the success of your individual posts. Social referral traffic is a great way to show how successful a social network as a whole is for driving people to your website.

With social referral traffic, you see how many visits each social network sent to your site. This would include any links that you shared personally as well as any links that were shared by others on social media. When seen side-by-side with organic traffic, referral traffic, and direct traffic, it does a great job of putting the impact of social media into perspective.

How to create the report:

In Google Analytics, go to All Traffic > Channels.

This report will show the percentage of traffic that comes from social, alongside traffic from search, direct, referral (other websites), email, and other.

To see the individual breakdown of traffic by social network, go to Acquisition > Social > Network Referrals.

This report will show you how much traffic has come from each website.

10. Funnel stuffs

“See these sales? How cool that these people started their buying journey on social media!”

For advanced users, funnel reports show not only the clicks and referral traffic back to your site but also where that traffic ends up going and what they end up doing. Does your social media traffic convert into leads? Into subscribers? Into sales? The funnel reports take into account the whole visitor journey, from tweet to visit to action.

How to create the report:

There are lots of ways to go about funnels. There are some helpful tutorials from KISSMetrics and Social Media Examiner that do a good job of going really in-depth on the topic.

One quick way I’ve found to set up some simple funnels tracking is to use Google Analytics Goals.

After logging in to Google Analytics, click the Admin link at the top of the page.

Give the new goal a name, choose the type of goal you want to create, and set the goal details so that Google Analytics knows when a goal is reached

Once this is all set up, you can view the analytics data for this goal—including the amount that social media contributes to goal conversions—by clicking on Conversions > Goals in your Google Analytics dashboard.

Over to you

How do you go about creating social media reports?

Have you tried looking at some of the above stats?

I’d love to hear about your experience (and if Reports is a feature you might find useful in Buffer!). I’ll look forward to hearing from you in the comments!

Hi Bradley! Really great idea! Thanks so much for your thoughts and feedback. I’d love to learn more about the info you use with Twitter and FB. I know they’ve got some great stuff in terms of impressions & reach data!

i could not agree more! Personally, one of the most tedious and hardest jobs of a Social community manager is the reports that we need to break down in such way that it would make sense to the clients.

Hi Jay! Thanks so much for the comment! Sorry the sheet isn’t working for you just yet. My hunch is that import & editing functions might be available once you make a copy of the spreadsheet to your Google Drive. Is that something you’d be up for trying (or have tried already)?

Thanks Kevan. That solved most of the issues with some tweaking. Now, just the graphs aren’t quite working. I appreciate your help.

Christine Murphy

I love it when you post report related articles! I swear that you had written one last year too and I thought that I had pinned it and I guess I didn’t. I’ve never been able to locate it since. I even spent a whole day going through weeks of browser history attempting to find it. It may have been an article written from someone else too. Who knows, it’s gone forever. Thanks for the template too!

Hi Christine! Thanks so much for the comment! I’m really glad you enjoyed this article. 🙂 I wrote a bit about social media audits several months back; I wonder if that might be the mystery article you referenced? 🙂

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Yay! So practical and a great way to show others in the business what social contributes. I started posting on our Socialcast about what’s happening (rather than just reporting to campaign coordinators) and people are really interested but want data in an accessible way. I”m still learning how to run analytics and reporting (and what’s valuable to report) so this has been really helpful. Thanks, Kevan.

Hi Anna! So great to hear from you. 🙂 Thanks for the comment, and I’d love to hear what you learn and discover about what’s most meaningful with your data. Have you come across any go-to stats just yet? 🙂

Nice article Kevan!
In my recent reports I have shown also some organic REACH records and COMPARISSONS with benchmark fanpages when it comes to reach and engagement – Facebook lets you to see the basic statistics of any fanpage which you choose. you can follo up to 5 of them at the same time. This is quite interesting, challenging and the results made my client quite happy 🙂
Also presenting the Likelyzer score can prove you are doing a great job (if you really are) – we have managed recently to get to #1 in category TV Shows – nice information for the client also…

Nice post Kevan! Going to look into some of these. Have a fun Friday! 🙂

tamara weibel

Hi Kevan, I’m knew to all this, I’m just wondering if you could explain something to me about social media marketing?
On your business fan pages, do you have to post articles only related to your business? Or can you post anything that you feel will get responses? I understand the theory of photos, videos, comps, quest’s, etc plan, but just finding it hard to find anywhere that tells you specifically what theme you use?
Sorry to ask on this feed, but i see you are a total guru on social media and i am struggling to find any info anywhere specifically on this..
Thank you, thank you, thank you!!

Nick

Hi Tamara! Sorry I’m not Kevan, but I’ve been a social media guy for a little while, so thought I’d offer my two cents.

I would suggest testing out lots of different content to see what gets the best response. The worst case scenario you can just delete the post if it doesn’t do so well. Just remember to take a note of the content performance each time, so you’ve got it for future reference!

I’ve been coordinating the content for a UK/US food business with around 150k fans for a year now, and we soon discovered what “resonated” with our audience. We still find that some ideas don’t do as well as we hoped and that some do better too.

One other note is to ask yourself, “why has this fan/ follower joined my community?”. In our case, it’s because (I hope) they think we have lots of cool information to share on our products and also generally interesting foodie facts. Therefore, if we were to post about the newest car Ford has to offer, we wouldn’t get a particularly engaged response… The most important question I ask myself is always “what is the customer take-out here”, or basically what does the customer/ fan get out of seeing this content? If it’s not something that reinforces your position and what you are trying to achieve on social media, I’d say you probably shouldn’t post it!

I hope this helps a bit 🙂

Nick

tamara weibel

Thanks so much Nick.. You have absolutely helped me out! I have been hitting and missing. I find my ‘misses’ are the ones that are related to the company and the ‘hits’ are the ones that are random unrelated video posts or quotes etc. So I have been confused. Still going to have to keep on with everything till i find our way I guess. By the sounds of it, I can’t just post the random things and do have to find company related posts!
Asking myself the question “what value will i give my customer?’ is a fantastic way to see it, thank you!
Ive noticed its hard these days with all the pages out there to get ‘screen time’ and likes, interaction, just persistence in finding good content I guess..
May I ask one more question?
You mentioned that you could delete posts that don’t get reaction. Is that a good practice to get into regularly?
Thanks so so much, really appreciate your time and knowledge..
Tamara:-)

Hi there Patrick! So sorry the original template didn’t consider this for you. I think one thing I found useful when editing the template for myself was going here: Format > Number > More Format > More Date and Time Formats. I’d imagine there’d be some European date formats in the options there. 🙂 Hope this helps!

Sabu Singh

Great post Kevan Lee I really eanjoy friday.

Rhea

Would you be adding Instagram on Buffer? Would make life a lot easier!

lazybonesaustralia

yes, please!! We’d love a metrics tool that could analyse FB, IG and twitter all in one go!

Marhuanta Barreto

Hi, I think there´s something wrong with the social media report template since the option for Import is deactivated, I click on the A1 cell and I can´t export any data downloaded from my buffer analytics, I can´t even click on it and see what the problem is. Help! I´m loving buffer and thought this report would be perfect but is just not working 🙁

Emily Weber

I’m not sure about the math for Reach Rate (#4). Can someone clarify?

If you look at the reach per post and divide that by your number of followers, you’re not factoring in the non-followers/non-fans who also see and engage your content. You’d actually want to filter down to fans and non-fans (Facebook lets you do this, I didn’t try Twitter yet) and then take the average of those numbers divided by the number of posts.

Otherwise, you’ve got engagement from non-followers mixed in to that total, which you’re then dividing by the number of followers, which will make your followers look more engaged than they are.

Hi Emily! Great one! Yes, you have this exactly right. I’ve seen a way to do this for Facebook Insights, not 100% sure where to look for the same on Twitter. Reach Rate is a bit inexact b/c of this. Sorry it’s not a more accurate number!

Emily Weber

Thanks! Just double-checking my understanding. Facebook does make it easy but I haven’t found that breakdown on Twitter either.

Syah Reza

i tried to learn how to use it and then i will give trainee all marcomm manager mall mall

Analucia Ortiz Gomez

Hi, this post is amazing!, congratulations.
I was trying to do the import on the report you let us dowload, but the “import” option is disabled!, is there any way to help me with this?
Thank you!

Mohamed Nour

Great article

Alicia Egan

This is a great post. You just saved me a ton of headache around creating a monthly social recap report. Great job!

Jean Carlo

Kevan, grateful for the knowledge. I would like to take a course if possible.

Thanks for this epic resource Kevan. I’m going to use your Google Doc and let you know how it works, I still haven’t found a good way to effectively communicate social media results other than going to Google Analytics and monitoring goal completions by social channel.

Alexandra Anna Brower

My spreadsheet is all wonky and not loading correctly. Help? @AlexandraABowen Not sure why it only does 2 weeks as well? Not the whole month?

Elvis

I can do this if I have the Awesome Plan?

Gillian

Hi Kevan,

This is SUCH helpful post– I’ll definitely be upgraded to businesses in order to get an easy analytics reporting system.

Only problem is, I seem to be having trouble with the template– when I import my data into the “export sheet”, it doesn’t transfer the information to the report card, which is the resource I wanted to use for my clients. Any suggestions of help would be fabulous. Merci!

Bryan Then

Hi Kevan , Can i have the access of the template ? I found it very useful .

Hey @disqus_ZiAV3qXUQm:disqus, if you click on File > Make a Copy, you’ll be able to create a copy of the template that you can edit. 🙂

Daniel Owen

Hi Kevan, I loved the article and any suggestion on how to speed up reporting is fantastic! I am however, struggling to use the report template. After uploading the csv file and importing it the data doesn’t seem to be being calculated by the report. I’ve tried emailing the support team, but I haven’t had a response yet.

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